Social Work Health Futures Lab

Become part of a new national social work health futures lab learning collaborative to discover, learn, create and contribute to helping health-social work to be ready for the future.

The Social Work Health Futures Lab will be an 18-month long exploration, collaborative learning network, fellowship, and playground to consider how a “foresight lens” might accelerate and improve the impact of social workers who work, do research, or teach in health and health-related areas of practice. Special attention will be paid to cultivating greater ability to navigate uncertainty and turbulence in the practice environment, engage communities in co-creating their futures, explore emerging trends and dynamics, and launch a more future-ready next generation of the health social work workforce. Being ready for the future is more than just asking simple questions. It is a disciplined way of organizing, imagining, and planning ideas - and is best done in a community of people who will push each other to question assumptions, explore ethical challenges and commit to opening new possibilities for thinking and practicing across the profession.

This community will intentionally include fellows who are looking at different elements of futures challenges. Some folks will be focused on climate change, others on food security, others on bioethics, racism embedded in emerging technologies, and many others. The goal of the Lab is to create spaces to foster intentional cross-fertilization, shared discovery, and meaningful contributions to intentionally evolving health-anchored social work thought and practice.

Common interests and themes will be a commitment to anti-racist principles, the social work code of ethics, and other cutting edge social work practice spaces such as the Social Work Grand Challenges. Interdisciplinary engagement with engineering and other sciences, the arts, other social sciences, and from a deep variety of perspectives are welcomed.